A history of human culture

Once upon a time 30.000 years ago, there were some human in a cave of southern France, who devoted their time to art. The documentary Cave of forgotten dreams captures the more ancient creation of humanity housed in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave. The really profound essence of the pictures lies in the perception, because this art transcends the visual. The director Werner Herzog highlights the importance of sensorial implications to sense the aura of the energetic, mobile and audible paintings of Chauvert’s cave. The documentary becomes a travel to the Palaeolithic’s art nature. After all, the cave turns to time capsule with which it is possible to communicate.   

Since Chauvet’s discovery in 1994, the entrance has been constrained to preserve integral the paintings away from overexposure. Herzog gains exclusive permission to film inside the cave, which can be arising as a gap between two irreconcilable imaginaries. However, the director suggests a variety of parallelisms between the cave’s representations and the contemporaries. In this way, the cave walls are almost like a form of proto-cinema: when the light is projected on the images generates the animation of the paintings and consequently it creates the sensation of movement.

The paintings are stirred and acquire a different life. Besides, the image of Fred Astaire dancing with his shadow establishes an extravagantly communicative bridge between Hollywood dances and the images of the cave. The past-present relationship is terminated because of these pictorial images such remote emerges a sense of familiarity.

Hergoz found this cave as the dawn of human intelligence and sensitivity. The documentary enhances the artistic value and, above all, the beauty of the paintings, driving-related prejudices primitivism. Jean Clottes, one of the scientists studying the cave, explains that the concept “homo sapiens” (“men who know”) is inadequate to describe the human species and he considers the most successful concept “homo spiritualis” (“spiritual being”).

Even on the premise that a reconstruction of the past is impossible, the goal of Cave of forgotten dreams is to delve into the stories of the past. The imagination is the mechanism for this retrocession: through the sensations transmitted by the cave, historical scenes can be reconstructed. The art is a language par excellence emotionally able to tell what happened. And the virtue of art is that leaves a room for the imagination in which we can incorporate our baggage and interpretations. So, although the exact content of the cave could have been disappeared as its members, it still remains the capacity to speculate on the meaning of the paintings. And this, finally, helps in recovering the quintessence of this space.